Get your first look at the new downtown Milwaukee streetcar: Slideshow

Just as the track and stations are starting to look like a real streetcar system in downtown Milwaukee, the vehicles that will run on the tracks are taking shape in a manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania. Check out the attached slideshow put together by TODAY’s TMJ4 reporter Tom Durian to get your first look at the Milwaukee streetcar.

Milwaukee Business Journal television news partner TODAY’S TMJ4 sent Durian to Brookville Equipment Corp.’s plant this week to check out the progress. Click here to see Durian’s report for TODAY’S TMJ4.

Brookville Equipment in Brookville, Pa., is manufacturing the streetcar vehicles that will run in Milwaukee in its plant north of Pittsburgh. The first are approaching completion, and will soon be shipped to Milwaukee so the city can begin testing before passenger service starts later this year.

The city in 2015 estimated it will cost $18.6 million to manufacture the four streetcar vehicles, each with three connected cars. Those will run on the first phase of the downtown streetcar. Another could be built for when service starts on a new spur to the downtown lakefront.

Wisconsin companies, including floor maker Milwaukee Composites in Cudahy, are supplying some pieces of the vehicles to Brookville.

Construction of the streetcar’s initial phase is well underway. It is scheduled to begin service in late 2018. That first phase will be a 3.9-mile loop running from the Milwaukee Intermodal Station on West St. Paul Avenue, through downtown, and north on Jackson Street to Ogden Avenue.

A loop to the downtown lakefront, along Michigan and Clybourn streets, would start service in late 2019. The streetcar’s ridership is projected to be 1,954 a day in 2018, increasing to 2,900 daily in 2020.